When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It’s also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is “the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders,” as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.
As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.
But I’ve married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.
I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.
I have a feeling that books are a lot like people – they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you’re older.
Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you’re actively miserable.
Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.
In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.
Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you’d find on a gramophone record.
It’s not easy to make friends when you’re an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.
Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren’t sure if we even liked one another anymore.
And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.
Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.
Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.